Drake Drive
By Keith Manos
PROMPT—Never will I forget ...
Drake Drive – this street name sounds almost poetic, doesn’t it? The two one syllable words, the alliteration, the brevity. In truth, Drake Drive stretches not even an eighth of a mile long, but so much happened there when I was a kid.
Let me define kid: a period that begins from the time we learn Santa Claus isn’t real to the time we want to have a romantic kiss. I doubt I would have any memories of those years at all if not for Drake Drive, where every spring and through the summer and fall, maple trees lined the tree lawns, like soldiers in military formation, to form an arching, green canopy across the street. On each side, cleanly paved sidewalks bordered square, green lawns that spread out in front of a row of two-story homes painted in pastel colors. This is suburbia, of course – a neighborhood, probably much like many others, that blossomed in the 1960s thanks to the accessibility granted by Henry Ford’s cars and Dwight Eisenhower’s interstate highway system, enabling families to leave downtown Cleveland.
On Drake Drive, a bike could rest comfortably on those front lawns overnight and into the next day – no kid or parent feared it would be stolen, porch lights stayed on past midnight, neighbors walked their dogs, mowed their lawns, and then, once back inside, peaked out between curtain shades, as if afraid to miss out on a strange jogger or a speeding car or the sharp and gossipy sounds of a spousal argument across the street.
My family and I moved to Drake Drive from the Tremont area in 1963, five months before the assassination of President Kennedy, when, after school started, once a month we practiced – incongruously – for a nuclear attack by kneeling under our school desks. No third grader truly understood the destruction a nuclear bomb could cause; we knelt beneath those little desks, made scary faces, giggled at each other. And there was certainly nothing to fear on Drake Drive – well, maybe Crazy Ed frightened us. This gray-haired, skull-faced, ghost-like neighbor who lived on the corner would during the daytime yell at us to stay off his lawn as we sauntered down the sidewalk or rode our bikes in the street, and at ten o’clock on warm nights he walked the street, pausing by each house to peer into any open windows as if searching for something before strolling on.
My life, like a novel plot with no backstory, emerged on Drake Drive, a street that dead-ended at the western edge of Cuyahoga County after a twenty-five minute car ride from downtown Cleveland. The distance was marked not so much by miles as by a change in lifestyle. Drake Drive was a green place, where adjacent back yards became a football field for my friends and I to play wild touch football games and where we waited impatiently beneath that canopy of trees for the ice cream van to make its way down our street on late summer afternoons, providing us our first experience with commerce as we negotiated the exchange of the quarters we clutched in our palms for the ice cream bars or popsicles inside that truck.
Drake Drive introduced us to friendship. Neighbors became extended family as our parents encouraged us to call the adult males uncle and their wives aunts. We enjoyed a life where we could run in the street and not worry about cars. Where we could even engage in juvenile vices without any serious risk of impunity: smoking cigarettes with Randy in a grassy field behind the Griffin home (two Pall Mall cigarettes I had stolen from my mother’s pack in her purse. Not really smoking them, just sucking the tobacco smoke into our mouths and then blowing it out into the cool evening air. Why did we do that? To be cool? How? We were hidden in tall grass in a vacant field.), and looking at pictures of naked women in a magazine Ken had sneaked away from his older brother. Who were these women? And why did they look so different from our mothers and sisters?
This was a life that couldn’t be rehearsed. Why did I ever leave? Why did I let an adult life of responsibility take me away from the safety and serenity – Crazy Ed notwith-standing – that was Drake Drive? Clearly, I had to go back.
I returned to Drake Drive in the fall not too long ago for a 30-year high school reunion, and I could not catch my breath as Randy drove us down the street beneath that maple tree canopy. Randy slowed his car in front of my old house, now re-painted and with a basketball hoop in the driveway. A football player’s family lived there now – I knew that because a sign in the shape of a football helmet on the front lawn had his number on it.
I knew of course it wasn’t my home anymore. Much like its current occupants, maybe we just borrowed it when I was a kid. Decades from now, another family would borrow it before moving on themselves. Nevertheless, I had to get a glimpse inside, probably just to reassure myself my memories weren’t fictionalized.
“Stop,” I ordered Randy. “Pull over for a minute.” And after he did, I exited the car, walked confidently to the front door, pressed the doorbell button.
The door opened maybe four inches and a middle-aged man in a white t-shirt peered at me, his face a question mark.
“Excuse me,” I said, peeking into the house. “I used to live here.”
“Yeah?”
“I just want to see . . .” But I didn’t know how to finish. What did I want to see? What difference did new wallpaper or different furniture matter now?
“Yeah?” he repeated, his voice worried now, his eyes narrowed and dark.
“I lived here when I was a kid.” I smiled, as if that would explain everything.
He kept his hand on the door and his eyes on me. “That has nothing to do with me.”
“Please,” I begged.
The man sized me up and shook his head. “Sorry,” he said and closed the door.
Keith Manos' stories have appeared in both print and online magazines including Aethlon, Litro Stories, October Hill Magazine, New Reader Magazine, and Attic Door Press, among others. He has also published twelve books to date, including his debut novel My Last Year of Life (in School), which was traditionally published by Black Rose Writing. Writing from Willougjby, Ohio, check out all of Keith’s books at www.keithmanos.com
